Examples of design timelines from freshmen and senior engineering students and
from expert practicing engineers. The lower right timeline
(high-performing expert) is shown in detail.

CELT Design Soundtracks

At the University of Washington’s Center for Engineering
Learning & Teaching (CELT), a key aspect of our research into
engineering design has been the development of rich visualizations
of the design processes of the engineers who participated in our
studies [1, 3]. One of the most successful of these
representations has been the design timelines (to the right).
Repeatedly, timelines have proven successful in conveying our
research findings to colleagues, researchers, and the engineering
community, and these successes encouraged us to explore and
demonstrate their effectiveness as pedagogical tools for use with
engineering students [4].

We continue to explore other representations of our design data
[3], and one direction we took was develop and study auditory
versions of our timelines. Inspired by comments from viewers that the
timelines reminded them of notes on a musical staff, we decided to create
design soundtracks (DSTs) of the timelines. These DSTs are an auditory
equivalent of the visual timelines in which the time-series data is converted
into notes and sounds. This music is then played alongside the corresponding
timeline.

The Soundtracks

As part of our work for the eighth
Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS8), we developed six versions of
design soundtracks [2]. These versions were
developed iteratively through sessions with CELT research staff and from feedback
from the design instructors interviewed as part of the DTRS8 study.

These four versions are literal translations of the timeline data. They
feature a simple, direct mapping of each activity to a corresponding sound
or instrument:

These other two versions are interpretive in that they go beyond a literal
mapping of the data. In these versions, we intentionally adjust the audio to
emphasize selected aspects of the data such as by increasing the volume of
selected activities at certain times in the soundtracks. We applied this
approach to two of the above versions:

Listening to the Soundtracks

From the links for each soundtrack version, one can select among nine participants'
timelines by clicking on the highlighted timeline. This will take you to a page
where our custom timeline player will let you see and hear that participant's design
process. On the same page will be a description of the soundtrack version and samples
of the sounds mapped to the design activities.

If you experience any difficulties with the player or the sample sounds, check
that you have a recent
version of flash player installed. Flash-blocking software may need to be disabled
for this site, but the pages should still give you notice that the flash is being
blocked. This site was optimized for modern versions of Internet Explorer (8+) and
Firefox (3+).

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the efforts of Zachary Goist for his work in developing
the design soundtracks and the flash player. We also thank Katherine Deibel
for designing and implementing this website. We also wish to acknowledge the following
software we utilized in our efforts: